NOTES ON A CHARACTER
49
tough. Somebody's got to do something." But that was quite an admis–
sion from Tommy: it was as though all the capitalist-trained and ignorant,
honest masses had spoken.
His wife, however, kept treating their own condition as though it
were a wound. She kept dressing it. From time to time she actually got
a temporary job, how, I don't know. She would slip out of the house
with a sly look, like a person who was about to pawn something precious,
and finally, after much coming and going, report that she had landed a
week's or two weeks' work. Tommy would watch her and wonder, just
watch her going through with it, and wonder. But he certainly was not
feeling ashamed or inferior because of her success: as, in a way, she
wanted him to· Then one began to realize that he didn't like it, that
he despised her for it, that somehow, to him, her dolling up and getting a
job was a sell out on her "class," a peddling of it.
I met him downtown several times during this period. "Say, what
is Communism?" he asked me one day. I tried to get the simple concrete
images for a statement. But as soon as I began to explain he grinned,
listened as he always did, decently, but with an "I am from Missouri"
smirk, and said thanks. He never asked me again. But finally I asked
him. "I looked at some of their stuff," he said, "but it don't get me.
It
don't get a guy a job. It may be all right, I guess, but it's too deep."
By "deep" he always meant either spurious or superfluous.
Then he got work himself. He got "called" by one of the relief-work
agencies. When he was quizzed and then investigated at home, he got
sore. "Think of it," he said, "in front of the baby!" But he took it·
For six weeks he addressed envelopes in a college building and then for
three weeks more sorted boob in a library a few hours a day and the
rest of the day twiddled his thumbs. He was disgusted with it, but it
was standing in line on pay day that infuriated him. "I don't mind
what they call work," he explained, "I guess there is no work. But that
hand-out line gets me." He despised the money he got. At least he al–
ways gave it all to her-a thing he never did with money he thought he
had earned-and took some from her only for the desperate necessities–
the newspaper (still the
Daily
Sun
L
cigarettes, carfare.
When he was paid off and told that when there was work for him
again he would be notified, he was relieved. He hated pretending that he
was a guy earning his living. But I don't think he ever asked the social
question, ever inquired of anyone or anything of the large alleviating
(certainly not the revolutionary) ways. It is possibly very difficult for
people who have been living and working outside of organized labor, even
